Accepting Your Darkest Emotions Is The Key To Psychological Health, By Lila MacLellan

Rumi, the 13th-century Sufi poet, famously compared emotions—”a joy, a depression, a meanness”—to “unexpected visitors.” His advice was to let them in laughing, but that’s not what we do. Instead, we pretend not to notice, or even hide. We want to bury resentment and anger, or trade loneliness in for the more fashionable gratitude.

However, psychological studies have shown that acceptance of those negative emotions is the more reliable route to regaining and maintaining peace of mind. Whether practiced through the lens of ancient Eastern philosophies, or in increasingly popular forms of treatment like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy, acceptance of one’s dark emotions is now backed by a body of evidence connecting the habit to better emotional resilience, and fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety.

Acceptance, therefore, is having a moment—at least among academics. But how and why it works has been little studied, says Brett Ford, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto. Not quite a strategy, she tells Quartz, “acceptance involves not trying to change how we are feeling, but staying in touch with your feelings and taking them for what they are.” So, she asks, how can it be that accepting negative emotions is paradoxically linked to long-term psychological thriving?

A few years ago, when Ford was a doctoral student at University of California, Berkeley, she and three fellow Berkeley researchers devised a three-part study to try and find out. Their findings were just published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

According to their analyses, the magic of acceptance is in its blunting effect on emotional reactions to stressful events. It’s that mechanism that can, over time, lead to positive psychological health, including higher levels of life satisfaction. In other words, accepting dark emotions like anxiety or rage, won’t bring you down or amplify the emotional experience. Nor will it make you “happy”—at least not directly.

I am asking you the followig question as I have not heard back from the author of this article. My question refers to the last sentence of the first paragraph,”We want to bury resentment and anger, or trade loneliness in for the more fashionable gratitude.” Am I understanding this correctly that doing various exercises, or a practice, of gratitude is not suggested or beneficial? So, is going to gratitude and thinking about all the ways in which one is blessed is a further way of hiding or burying one’s loneliness; going to the positive and not being present in one’s pain? I would imagine some time spent in gratitude is helpful in realizing all that you do have and realizing that you are NOT disconnected. I guess one could focus to much on gratitude and evade the pain, darkness.

I’m not sure what this author believes about that, but I believe that practicing gratitude is NOT spiritual bypassing of emotions such as loneliness, fear, anger, or grief. It’s all about intention. Gratitude, alongside a willingness to feel one’s feelings, can only increase our sense of joy and wellbeing.